Raff

Unless you're very very lacking in stuff to do in your life, surely quality of a game is the most important thing? A short game can be worth full price if it's really really good, and that quality could be hindered by spreading it more thinly to last longer. It's not something you can quantify and compare, every game is different. Many games (probably most in fact) are designed to be replayed many times. It boils down to whether you FEEL like the game is good value for money. You don't make that decision by looking at how long it lasted, you just know. Isn't Splinter Cell the kind of game with loads of different possibilities that you can just replay and mess around with the AI? A bit like Hitman? I don't play many of these kinds of mainstream AAA linear games anymore, but when I do I prefer them to end with me wanting more than to end with me feeling relieved that it's over. Metro 2033, an ultra linear FPS, only lasted 7.7 hours according to steam but I still liked it a lot.

Gears of War now in Technicolor!

That's actually pretty high.

It's released at some point today on Steam for £10 and it's still very good fun. New ingame trailer, HUD and all (the way it always should be): Dedicated server is still a couple of weeks away but they've improved the browser so as long as you don't join any games with 80+ ping it usually works fine until the host leaves. If you want to host a game it's mainly about your upload speed.

I'm not into Doctor Who but I like the way this is being done. Was expecting a hellish cheap Wii/PS2 game in the BBC tradition of making absolutely shit games for people to impulse buy in Tesco based on the box/brand alone. Maybe they'll do one of those too.

As an iTunes hater, I just use RSS feeds in Google Reader.

This is a very very good game. In fact it's the best linear FPS I've played, I often find them extremely dull. It's much better than any Half Life. I don't really understand how the shooting is 'wonky', the guns feel overly accurate to me if anything, as long as you time your bursts properly. It definitely has an unrealistic light-weight feel to it which I know annoys some people but I prefer it that way in an atmospheric and stealthy game like this. The visual detail and level design is absolutely phenomenal. I'd not watched any trailers or anything, was expecting a fairly low budget low system spec CIS shooter. I think I'm getting close to the end, it'll be the first game I complete in a long time.

Actually I'm his mother!

Where did you get this impression? Isn't he just an amiable internet games person of above average pseudo fame? I'm sure there are some strange people on some forum that are obsessed, like a lot of things. But who cares about that? Just you. What a weird thread...

Could not see a thread. This is a very fun and polished low-price download multiplayer shooter (5v5). You can play it right now if you prepurchase on Steam. It's also meant to be coming to XBLA and PSN soonish and is clearly aimed mainly at XBLA as the PC version has all the hallmarks ('how to play' section in the menu etc). In fact right now it only has XBL style peer-hosted matchmaking although they are working on a dedicated server. It also lacks any graphical options besides resolution right now which makes the requirements quite high. It looks beautiful and runs great for me though. There's an obvious influence from TF2 but not too much, it's very different. The map design in particular stands out to me, it's a lot busier and less choke pointy and flanking plays a much bigger role. The classes are more focused on profficiency at different ranges + 1 special ability each. My only problem besides the missing PC features is the lack of crouching. I can't work out why they've not included it. It's developed by a studio that spun off from the now bankrupt Grin, and it uses their engine. It's published by Paradox and I think it might actually be their first console game. some video:

Apart from the hideous characters I quite like the sparse visual style to be honest, I think they've done a pretty good job on that given the low budget and rubbish tech they probably had to work with. Genre doesn't interest me at all though and I always hate Squeenix games.

Last night I had a game of Rush with only 1 squad on each side, on a NO SNIPERS server, on the snowy night time map. Absolutely amazing. I think Battlefield is actually at its best with just a few players hunting eachother down on a big map, listening for every footstep. And it's ALWAYS nice to do away with the sniper rifle kiddies.

Battlefield 2 ran like dog shit on any computer and the server browser was hell. Bad Company 2 runs beautifully but the server browser is hell. I suppose they'll get there in the end.

Went to buy Bioshock 2 and came home with the new Stalker which was 20 Euros cheaper. Enjoying it a lot so far, much more than Clear Sky. Plus ongoing Darkfall and Demon's Souls sessions.

Thanks! Reassured that it's not some complicated time consuming process (like Junket turned out to be), I heated up some semolina and milk just like I would porridge (plus a little sugar) and it's as simple as that.

I want to make what I know as simply "Semolina", the sloppy/stodgey pudding I had at school, but weirdly it doesn't seem to exist in this form on the internet. I'm pretty sure it's just semolina and milk, heated up. I don't think it was even sweetened, we'd put honey or jam into it ourselves, in a bowl like rice pudding. But every recipe online for semolina dessert is some kind of baked thing that I've never knowingly encountered. Does anyone know what I mean?

I've never met anyone who owns a Wii or PS3.

Where do you put your legs when you use the PC?

Majora's Mask is my favourite game. Played TP on GC and ditched it at the snow mansion dungeon. It just didn't have any big new ideas to keep me interested. OoT and MM were still amazing after LttP because they had really good, original and captivating concepts overriding everything. The dungeon/new item/boss Zelda structure isn't interesting enough to stand on its own to me anymore.

While it didn't have the RPG longevity, Demon's Souls reminds me a lot of God Hand which was a superb challenge and had tons potential for playing around with different sets of moves.

Semantics. Valve is a retailer as far as I'm concerned.

2 years ago I played loads of games. Most of the big console games as they came out, lots of catching up on older console and PC games that I missed when I was too young to know of or afford them. Then I started playing MMOs 90% of the time. Got a addicted to a few, but when I looked at what I was actually doing in them I wasn't impressed. So I looked around again and settled on Age of Conan which had much better production values and didn't make me feel like I was being tricked into buying and enjoying packaged shit. I met a lot of awesome people from all over the place and played it for more than a year before getting sick of the direction of its development. That direction turned out to be "become even more like Warcraft and other popular competitors". So I started playing Darkfall (http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/darkfall) with a couple of friends. Almost a year later I have absolutely no interest in any MMO that isn't in this depressingly tiny fraction of MMOs that are actually genuinely player driven, and still play hardly any other games. I've spent so much less on games over the last few years that I was able to justify to myself spending 300 euros on a PS3 purely for Demon's Souls and The Last Guardian. What I'm not entirely sure about is whether my taste has changed or whether mainstream games have become less interesting, which is why I still come here to see what people are talking about: just to check. Uncharted 2? Doesn't make me even remotely curious. This Demon's Souls thing looks great though.

Darkfall is phenominal.

'Mature' = for children Or rather, a game unsuitable for children in order to appeal to children.